The Essentials to Building a Great Site

Knowing that it only takes about 10 seconds to make an impression to your visitors, it is indeed crucial to have a functional, great looking website. Whether for business purposes or personal use, building an impressive site is very important, here are some essentials to create a great site:

User-friendly navigation – The menu navigation should be simple and easy to understand. Ensure that there is a systematic hierarchy of text links on your website. Your home page must be easily accessible on each page. Place links that would smoothly take your visitors from one page to another without any complication.

Content will always be king – Your content is the basic foundation of your website. A website with informative content never fails to end up becoming popular in the long run. Aside from having numerous visitors obtaining useful data from your site, optimized content will also rank well in various search engine results. Update your content on a regular basis to ensure the information is always fresh and current. It would also be helpful to check for spelling and grammar errors on your website copy text.

Test for usability – Be sure to test your website using different browsers. What works with Internet Explorer may not do fine with Mozilla or Safari. To guarantee a more professional appearance of your site, test your web pages using every available browser used online.

Less is actually more – Go easy with distracting flash animation or huge files that take a while to load. Music and videos are fine, as long as they are not auto-played because they can cause pages to load slower. In some circumstances, they can also crash the user’s browser. Just refer to Google’s website and you’ll understand that less bytes mean quicker loading of web pages.

See to it that there are no broken links and blank pages – Nothing is ever more frustrating for visitors than encountering the “Page cannot be displayed” message on their computer monitor.

Design consistency – There is a fine line between a well-designed site and an overly decorated site. The look and feel should be consistent all throughout by choosing the same design theme. Be sure it is simple yet interesting.

Encourage interaction – An interactive website is always good, especially for business sites, wherein you want to gain more customers. Put an email link somewhere highly visible. You can also have links to sign-up for newsletters, or fill out online forms, etc. Consider live chat support, support downloads, product specification sheets, etc.

Spread the word – What’s the use of a great site if you’ll keep it to yourself? Promote it and let people know about your website through advertising, direct mail, online marketing, referrals, and other marketing efforts.

Keep in mind these fundamental pointers above to accomplish a great website. Now, if you want to avoid the hassles, it’s always a smart decision to hire a professional website designer.